The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, has insisted that its 2023 presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar won the last election.
PDP National Publicity Secretary, Debo Ologunagba, said results from polling units showed that Atiku won the presidential election, but the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, announced the President-elect, Bola Tinubu as the winner of the election.
Ologunagba was reacting to the remark of the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, on the opposition losing the 2023 presidential election.
Atiku and Labour Party’s Peter Obi lost the presidential election to Tinubu according to INEC.
Both candidates are before the presidential election tribunal contesting the outcome of the election.
But, Mohammed had charged the opposition to stop their endless griping over the last election because they lost woefully.
The minister said President Muhammadu Buhari’s analysis on why the opposition lost the 2023 presidential election was incontrovertible.
In a statement issued in Abuja on Sunday by his Special Assistant (Media), Segun Adeyemi, the Minister said, “Mr President’s analysis on the reasons for the opposition’s loss in the 2023 elections was incontrovertible.
“President Buhari deserves nothing but accolades for delivering undoubtedly the best election in Nigeria’s history, adding that the tempestuous but predictable reaction to the President’s comments by the opposition has shown them for what they are: shameless sore losers.
”President Muhammadu Buhari lived up to his billing by delivering a free, fair and credible election, and his legacy is assured. The President would rather lose his state and many of his party’s strongholds than tamper with the fidelity of the election, and that is why he provided a level playing field for all parties,” Mohammed added.
He, however, stressed that the opposition’s overconfidence going into the election stemmed in part from the blitzkrieg of social media propaganda as well as faulty and procured opinion polls, which were apparently meant to hoodwink their foreign backers and a section of the international media into uncritically reporting that they were coasting home to victory when they were indeed heading into the ravine of defeat.
The minister further said the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Bola Tinubu, won the presidential election fair and square, clinching the majority of the votes cast and surpassing the constitutionally-stipulated 25% of votes cast in each of at least two-thirds of all the states in the Federation and the Federal Capital Territory.
“Going by the results, none of the opposition parties met any of the conditions stipulated for winning the presidential election. They didn’t even come close, in spite of their pre-election grandstanding.
”They (opposition) keep leaning on some international observers to justify their fraudulent claim that the election was rigged.”
Continuing, Mohammed said, “They conveniently forgot what Ambassador Johnnie Carson, the revered US diplomat who co-led the National Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute International Election Observation Mission to Nigeria said that the APC candidate undoubtedly won the polls.
”They also forgot that the African Union Election Observation Mission to Nigeria said the atmosphere was generally calm and peaceful in 95% of the polling units visited,” he said, adding that it is on the strength of these reports that many nations, including the US and the UK, wasted no time in congratulating the victorious APC presidential candidate.”
Reacting to the issue of IReV portal, Mohammed slammed the opposition for continuously seeking to mislead the world by clutching at the weak straw that results were not immediately uploaded onto the portal as if it has any role to play in the collation of results.
He said, “The opposition’s insinuation that the failure to immediately upload the result of the presidential election onto IReV affected the credibility of the election is a fraud. It is an act of blackmail and deceit by desperate individuals.
”The opposition Labour Party, in particular, will go down in the history books as the first-ever distant third-place finisher in a presidential election anywhere to have bold-facedly claimed victory,” he added.
However, Ologunagba said Mohammed’s remark was aimed at bullying the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal.
A statement by Ologunagba reads: “The PDP insists that its candidate, Atiku clearly won the February 25, 2023 Presidential election, as shown from the actual votes cast at the Polling Units across the country.
“The PDP describes the subjudice claims by the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, that the opposition lost the election, as yet another in the series of attempts by the All Progressives Congress (APC)-led Federal Executive to bully and blackmail the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal.
“Nigerians are aware that by the authentic results obtained from the Polling Units, Atiku Abubakar and not the APC candidate met all the conditions stipulated for the winning of the Presidential election.”
